40: Taste
Robots, all the people in the world, Carl Wilson, Celine Dion, and me.
A New Aphorism: Please Spread Widely
“There are 7-point-something billion people in the world: people who love music, people who love learning, people who love defining themselves with tokens of identity, people who love competing/tribalism, people who like music but stop listening after they get married, people who love George Benson’s Breezin’, people who don’t, people who know everything about something, people who know a little bit about everything, people who spend years trying to understand A Love Supreme, people who love baseball stats, and little robots with top hats.”
Were you counting? I believe that’s 7-point-something billion, all summed up. Oh, and there are “people who love having their certainties blown wide open and people who find that terrifying.” Plus “Drunks, who like all of their favourite experiences to just repeat and repeat and repeat, who like to recall the time they discovered Robbie Williams, and don’t care if you’ve heard it before five hundred times over ten years.”
There - that’s all the kinds of people.
Oh - and there is a kind of person who will immerse herself in [something], despite initial feelings of resistance, to see what it is that other people like about it. I mentioned this a couple weeks ago, when I said I would never do that for the Tom Tom Club.
I really enjoy this kind of person, and seek to be this kind of person. I see them as more True, somehow, in their love of music. Someone like this, I trust the opinion of - even if our tastes differ, even if their suggestion initially makes me go “What??” If this kind of person recommended my giving Tom Tom Club a break/a listen, I would happily do it, so we could talk about it.
Let’s Talk About Let’s Talk About Love
I want to recommend a book. I’ve read it many times, and have given it to people as gifts many times as well, and think it is important. It’s by a Canadian music writer, Carl Wilson, and it is called Let’s Talk About Love (one of the 33 and 1/3 series, each concerned with a different album).
Carl Wilson’s 33.3 book was subtitled A Journey to the End of Taste, and in it he spent a YEAR listening to Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love. He was trying to challenge his own tastes - to balance the music critic’s feelings about Dion against the opinions of zillions of Celine’s fans; to ask why those opinions should be so different; and to learn all he could about all the aspects of such a big question.
It is a brilliant, mind-expanding read, and I suggest that if you think you’ve got, like I have, an informed and sparkling set of musical opinions, you should read it.
If Carl writes a book about the Tom Tom Club, I’ll read it.
Watch This
This explores the song “All By Myself,” which Eric Carmen did in the '70s, which was sort of written by Rachmaninov; in particular, Dion’s performance of it right after her gross, questionable husband died. You will be surprised to learn why Dion punches herself in the chest while she’s singing, and what a fantastic athlete of singing she is. Even if you, like I, do not gravitate to CD’s Hollywood style, this video will show you why she’s impressive, and how. (No, I don’t know all the theory, but I like hearing it, and maybe each time someone hurts my brain with it, it grows a little smarter.)
That is all. I love you all equally.
Til next week -
jep